Dragon Age: The Telltale Heart
by Apollo Wings
Summary: Happy Hallowe'en fanfictioners! The first tale leading up to All Hallow's Eve when things will get spooky! Loghain confronts the thoughts in his own head and the gripping paranoia that every soul of those he feels responsible for killing is being weighed upon his own with the thudding of a heart. Drabble.


Author note: Just a short horror story with one of my favourite Dragon Age characters and a lot of guilt. Not written to imitate the work of Poe but the story itself. Based upon the thought of Loghain struggling with his innate sense of right and wrong as well as the assumption he's being controlled in some extent by Howe and his bevy of blood mages.

Happy Hallowe'en you crazy fanfictioners!

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Loghain paced the room, frantic, choppy motions about the floorboards. The creak of them beneath his heavy footfalls almost disquieting in such a silent, dusty room.

The glass in his hand shook with the nerves. Blast it that mage said this tonic would cure that! Would stop these damned doubts he'd felt over what he kept looking back at as mistakes.

So much to hate and feel bile over, the monster within that filled his veins worse than any taint the darkspawn could bring upon Ferelden.

He took a long draught of the sloe gin mixed with tonic, hoping for some relief.

He hadn't thought, he just hadn't thought.

But it was done now. Rowan's brother would be no more, he caused too much trouble. He was bad for Ferelden. He had loved her! How could her brother have been so distanced from such a proud warrior!

And soon the Arl of Redcliffe would join his sister in the Fade. The deaths over the years would mount up against his soul and yet there would be no reprieve! No end to it all!

Loghain sat the glass down upon the table, sitting behind it and staring at the dwarven made clock upon the wall, waiting for the lulling tick to sound in the room and the chiming of the bells as the hours passed.

It was the waiting he could not stand! The fear that the time had stopped finally and he would find that the souls he put to death would weigh against his own, damn him to the Void for what needed be done.

He could almost hear the heartbeats, getting louder, the cloying, sickly lub and thud overwhelming the ticking of the clock upon the wall.

He steadied his hands upon the table, trying to drown out the sound and force his mind to ease.

Yet still the sound persisted in this damned room. Constantly the sound would hound him.

Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. On and on the sound followed him, a constant reminder that once he was dead and burnt those souls would weigh against the blackness left within.

Thud. Thud. Thud. Loghain reached for the crystal cut tumbler, the drops of the tonic clinging rebelliously to the belled sides.

He reached for the pre-mixed decanter, pouring two fingers into the glass with hands that still shook with the nerves. That mage said this would cure him! This incessant shake and doubt, the nausea and headaches, the feeling of dread and that his heart were crushed to ash inside his chest.

Yes - that was the feeling of the souls. Thud. Maric. Thud. Rowan. Thud. Cailan - the last of his two greatest friends. Thud. Eamon. Thud. Himself.

He could hope. Stop this from ending.

Thud. It pounded inside his head and he drank the sloe gin and tonic prescribed by Howe's mageling almost desperately.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

It were as if the floorboards themselves held the heartbeats of all those people he'd failed. People he owed.

Thud.

It just kept on coming.

The glass shattered within his iron-grip, the shards embedded into his hands. He could not feel it, not the pain.

Just the alien intrusion of sharp within the calluses and lines of his palm, the soft drip of his own blood from hand to table and floor.

Thud. They wanted his blood. Thud. They needed it.

Thud. They wanted him to die, to be weighed as was proper.

Thud. Why! Thud. Why him! Thud! What had he done to make such foolish, rash decisions! Thud!

He painstakingly picked the glass out of his hand, mopping the blood with a handkerchief.

Yet the thudding continued in the room. Haunting him. Loghain squeezed his eyes shut.

It was nothing more than an 'over-acuteness of the senses'. That's what the mage had said.

The thudding played louder. Faster. Taunting him. He bent to the floorboards on all fours, fingers wedged between the crack within and tore furiously at them.

The thudding was beneath, some hoax no doubt to torment the Regent. An enemy wishing him to be weak.

Loghain Mac Tir was not a weak, doddering fool!

The floorboards pried apart with a snap of the wood, splinters flying in odd directions as he discarded it to the side.

Loghain shuddered to a still, peering at what could have been rigor touched faces in agony. Each demanding why. Why?

The thudding beat visually from that dark gap beneath what had been his footfalls. The wrong reflected back at him as were it glaringly obvious.

And Loghain saw himself reflected. He was wrong.

But the die had been cast now. He stood up, set in his ways to see things through to the bitter end.

Yet the thudding continued. It was haunting yet comforting in it's way. To know he'd always have the certainty of the Void for his actions.


End file.
